Amazon Cloud: Lower Prices, Plus MySQL

MySQL, the open source database that Oracle may soon own, has made the leap into Amazon Web Services. Indeed, Amazon says MySQL has come to the cloud in the form of new Relational Database Service (RDS). Plus, Amazon is dropping cloud prices across the board and putting in new high-memory instance options on the Amazone Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform. Here's why VARs should care.

We concede: Many VARs and managed service providers (MSPs) are yet to use the Amazon cloud, according to ongoing MSPmentor 100 research from our sister site. But progressive solutions providers -- such as Levementum and OpenBI -- have already moved customer applications into Amazon's cloud.

Price cuts could make Amazon's cloud even more compelling. Effective November 1, the price of a Linux-based EC2 instance will cost 8.5 cents an hour, a fifteen percent cut. The new high-memory instances will allow solutions providers to customize their CPU, memory resources, and network throughput in virtual machine environments.

“For almost two years, many AWS customers have taken advantage of the simplicity, reliability, and seamless scalability that Amazon SimpleDB provides; however, many customers have told us that their applications require a relational database. That’s why we built Amazon RDS, which combines a familiar relational database with automated management and the instant scalability of the AWS cloud,” said Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services, in a prepared statement.

This isn't the first attempt at implementing SQL in the cloud: Windows Azure will support it, and Zoho has had CloudSQL since late last year, but Amazon's attempt is the most high-profile, and as far as we know, the only one using MySQL.